squonk

Why do I love noise so much? Why do I build it all day, and protect it? Why do I fear leaving it aside, for even a minute (much less ten, much less a month…)?

Noise isn’t all that bad. There’s probably a nutritional need for it… but a diet needs variety.

Positives for noise – it shares features with chaos – it can be a bed of creativity; all kinds of connections can be found inside it. It carries energy; it dresses us up/protects and expands us – the sense of us (in ourselves and in the world).

I hold noise to create the illusion of a safe and stable present tense, where memory and the future are handled as workable, subject material.

The present isn’t safe and stable; it’s available, and is experienced most lucidly through availability (when we meet the present with the substance of the present; the classic image of water in water…). A note makes sense relative to other notes, or at least to the beginning and end of the note. If a note were stable (happening forever) we couldn’t hear it. Wanting to freeze the present as a safe space, I can try to include, at the same time, the note and the not-note – the note and the note around it. This is a wonderful squonk sometimes; sometimes, it’s just noise. It’s noise when I bring the past into the present in an unexamined way – as if it were money, or other flat sign that entitles me to revenge or reward. And I bring the future to me in pictures that confirm the expense – I get the receipt, as if I have already spent the past-money.

I don’t own the past and I can’t buy the future. The present, as a note, is sometimes best left – unhearable (unsquonked)… the present is a note of infinitely brief duration – genuinely infinite (can’t be experienced in finite terms). Squonking and silence can be means to the same end: an effort at infinity – at letting one’s self go, into availability. Squonking (and silence, for that matter) can be problematic when they are commercialized (in the sense of being about having, owning, controlling) – and we are trained daily to be commercial beings (acquiring personal safety/immortality through purchase)… The fee (ransom) has already been paid. We have nothing we need to buy (from a moral or cognitive or spiritual point of view), in order to be. Commerce wins the out-loud day in terms of material survival; our phonemes are deafeningly loud. Silence is an alternate dialect.